Plaça St. Felip Neri

St. Felip Neri square is a haunting reminder of the Civil War in Spain.  It is beautiful and surprisingly silent in its proximity to the major tourist attractions of the Gothic neighborhood.  Its history and bloodshed weigh heavily on anyone who walks through the narrow streets to find it.

I found a really good history of Plaça St. Felip Neri on this blog: 

Not everybody knows that where today the square is in the Medieval period stood a Jewish cemetery. During the Renaissance two buildings were erected, the casa dels Calderers, the former headquarters of the calderai corporation, and the casa dels Sabaters, the house of cobblers, which nowadays houses the aforementioned Museu del Calçat. Between 1721 and 1752 the baroque church was constructed, designed by the architect Pere Bertran and assisted by the builder Salvador Ausich i Font. The church comprises only one nave, an element that serves to focus the visitor’s attention on the magnificent high altar, which dates from the end of the Eighteenth century. The façade of the church, however, remains disfigured by one of the many bombardmentsthat took place during the Spanish Civil War.



The commemorative plaque states that in this square on the 30th January 1938 a bomb fell that was to cause the collapse of the underground part of the church of Sant Felip Neri, causing the death of 42 civilians, including 20 children, who were taking refuge here. It was not, however, the most severe bombardment in the history of the city- according to memorials, the real terror was to strike between the time of 22.08 on the 16th March and 15.19 on the 18th March 1938. These 41 hours of terror, with 12 huge attacks and the indiscriminate detonation of 44 tons of bombs on the civilian population brought the city to its knees. However, the death of so many innocent civilians and the still-disfigured façade of the church give the square a melancholic air that strikes you right to the heart and, in its own way, makes the square fascinating.